Reality Bites
by Ripper101
Summary: Mick muses about the nature of familiarity in his relationship with Beth.


Author's Note: Special Thanks to Anatomy Melancholia, who read this through and told me kindly that it didn't suck. In the spirit of her kindness, if any reader finds anything amiss in the characterizations or just the story in general, please blame her.

Disclaimer: I own no rights to 'Moonlight' or the characters contained herein. I mean no offence by this and certainly make no financial gain from it.

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After eight months the glamour had worn off.

Beth was still Beth, lovely and warm and utterly delightful. But now Beth was also… annoying.

Mick found himself nonplussed by that realisation. He adored her, he always hastened to add, but she exasperated him.

The crunch came when he woke up to a bathrobe thrown over his freezer and a pair of fluffy slippers strewn around the bottom. Puzzling as it was to understand why Beth had been changing near his freezer, it was a bit more alarming given that he'd found them as he got up. Which meant that she'd been there while he'd been asleep- for want of another word- and had happily changed out of a bathrobe and fluffy slippers in the somnambulant presence of her pet vampire.

Was that what he was?

She should, by rights, have been shunning this room, this space in which the unnatural showed itself. He was Vampyre. That meant danger and death and the inspiration for dread. Yet he'd almost fallen over a pair of fluffy slippers. Blue ones with little flowers. He felt oddly betrayed.

He suspected that his mystique was fading.

She tended to poke him in the arm more often these days. She got him bags of blood and happily washed his glasses when he was done. She knew which days his sheets got changed and where he kept the broom. She even knew- God help him!- where he hid his girlie magazines.

It was hard to be mysterious when one found one's girlfriend giggling over lurid photographs of surgically enhanced breasts.

"I see you found Roxanne," he sighed, resigned immediately to being the butt of a few jokes. His only hope was that she'd get tired of making fun of him.

"And Angeline," she nodded, "And M-Monique."

Admirable. She managed to say it with only one stammer. He eyed her and relaxed slightly. After all, it was the twenty-first century. Women were used to the idea of porn and she must have known, surely, given that he'd been alone for many long years.

Well, yes, there had been the occasional hook-up and darkened bedroom. Any smart vampire knew that you took a girl from behind if you didn't want her to see you flash the fangs. So long as you didn't bite her, she never needed to know that she'd been done by the un-dead.

He leaned companionably on the desk, trusting in Beth's sense of fairness to carry him through it. Besides he could smell a few pheromones and the years never quite took away a man's appetite for seeing a woman react to her own sex.

"These are totally fake," Beth proclaimed. "I would not have pegged you for a breast man."

His eyes dropped to her neckline. Lascivious. Obvious. Leering.

She didn't even flinch. "Okay, not a fake breast man."

He shrugged. "They were big. I'm a guy. Don't those two go together?"

She considered that. "Huh. So you like them big."

He cocked an eyebrow.

Big blue eyes sparkled up at him. "We all like them… big," she said. And then collapsed in hysterical laughter.

He could safely say the mystery was fading.

It wasn't always a bad thing. It was good to have Beth come around unannounced. Sometimes even comforting, if his day had been bad. Bad days could involve bullets and it wasn't always easy to get bullets out of his back unless he broke his vertebrae and twisted into a one-eighty degree corkscrew.

He believed he made her bad days better too. Granted, he didn't have to dig bullets out of her, but he listened. As a good man should. And he soothed. As a good friend should. And he held her. As a good lover should.

Sometimes those bad days reminded him of how romantic it really was. Any day now Mick expected to hear someone say something about picket fences and taming the wild beast.

"Which one," he murmured out aloud.

Beth wasn't exactly Miss Demure herself. Perhaps a bit small, a little fragile, certainly vulnerable, but damn, the woman could kick!

Talbot was very impressed with her ability to handle herself. He obviously felt justified in giving her the dangerous assignments. So far Beth had handled missing kids, rapists, drug dealers and armed robbers.

She kicked in bed too and Mick knew- just knew- that the morning caught barely healed bruises to his shins and calves. Not to mention the point when she'd hit him in the face while flailing.

The poor darling had had a nightmare.

He'd held her, soothed her, loved her. And she'd gone back to sleep while he slowly fried in the over-comfortable warmth of Beth and bedclothes.

No, all in all, losing the glamour wasn't all bad. Even if he did feel his smacked cheek tingle as she snored heavily on his chest.


End file.
